


Gratitude

by acorday



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, POV Jude Duarte, Power Dynamics, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29699613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acorday/pseuds/acorday
Summary: Two years after the Court of Shadows foiled Balekin's attempted coup and installed Dain as High King of Faerie, Jude is unhappy. Fortunately, there are games yet to play, and she's not the innocent girl she once was.
Relationships: Jude Duarte/Cardan Greenbriar
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	Gratitude

_I'm not talking of a hurried night_  
_A frantic tumble then a shy goodbye_  
_Creeping home before it gets too light_  
_That's not the reason that I caught your eye_  
_Which has to imply, I'd be good for you_  
_I'd be surprisingly good for you_

* * *

“A mortal...”

“And a knight. How delightful.”

“Where did Dain find this one, do you think? She’s young, but not very pretty...”

I had been trying to ignore the slurred interest from the selkies for a while now. They followed me as I stalked through the throng of merry-makers, denizens of Elfhame and the Undersea mixed in uncharacteristic harmony. People danced all around me, drunk on faerie wine and frivolity. My head remained clear. As a knight in High King Dain’s personal guard officially, and a spy in his Court of Shadows covertly, I had my mandate on nights like these: keep the High King safe. Listen for secrets. Root out traitors. The grander the revel, the looser the lips, and tonight was the grandest revel of them all.

I could expect nothing less for the wedding of High King Dain and Nicasia, Princess of the Undersea.

The festivities were due to last a full month, and they had just begun.

“Mortal girl,” called the selkie. Discomfort twisted in my stomach. I was an effective spy because I was invisible, a plain mortal girl slipping between the seams of Faerie.

When I was noticed, it was rarely a good sign.

I turned to face my admirers. “How can I help you?”

With inhuman speed, one of them snapped the strand of rowan berries off my neck.

“Come with us.” Thick, heady glamour entered the selkie’s voice. “You trust us absolutely, do you not, little girl?”

“I trust you,” I repeated, as if in a daze, as I tried to figure out the best way to get out of this.

Nobody knew that I was resistant to all enchantment but Dain’s. It was my greatest weapon and my heaviest secret. If it was some minor humiliation the selkies wished me to endure, meaningless entertainment at the expense of a helpless mortal, I knew from past experience that I was better off enduring it. But I hadn’t yet dealt with Undersea faeries. They had a reputation for cruelty exceeding even that of the Court of Grackles, Prince Balekin’s ill-fated cadre whose leading members had been quietly disposed of by the Court of Shadows in the wake of Dain’s ascension.

“Follow, and we will show you the delights of the Undersea.” The second selkie beckoned me to his side, sandwiched between him and his friend.

In their arrogance, they neglected to disarm me. My fingers itched for the blade at my hip, but fear of the repercussions stayed my hand. I was a spy. Expendable. Dain wouldn’t hesitate to cut me loose if I proved a diplomatic liability by, for example, attacking two members of Orlagh’s court.

“Jude Duarte. What are you doing with these?” Another voice cut in. It was so sober, it took me a couple long seconds to identify the speaker.

“Your Highness,” said the selkie to my left. He twisted the appellation so that it sounded half a mockery.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to borrow Jude,” Cardan said lazily, but his words held a note of tension.

“But we were having so much _fun_.”

“This is really quite urgent. Dear Jude, won’t you condescend to step aside and have a word with me? In private, of course.”

I weighed my options. Cardan hated me and had antagonised me throughout school, but in the two years since Dain’s coronation we had exchanged barely a word, he content to leave off and get in whatever ridiculous mishap the latest gossip tittered about. In short, he was the devil I knew. Compared to the inebriated, deadly selkies, the choice was obvious.

I feigned confusion. “I don’t know. I trust my friends, and they asked me to follow them.”

Annoyance flashed across Cardan’s expression. “Forget whatever inane commands they’ve stuffed into your head.” His own countering glamour, like a bucketful of cold water – that was my cue. I broke free of the selkies, and he nearly dragged me away.

“Alright,” I said, wrenching myself free of Cardan’s grip as soon as we were safely hidden behind a copse of firs. “What was that for?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Is that how you show gratitude?”

I bit back my more acerbic comments. “My sincerest thanks, Your Highness. Now will you deign to tell me what you wanted? You can’t have me believe you extricated me out of the goodness of your heart.”

“Dance with me.”

“What?” I looked at him as if he’d sprouted horns, which considering we were in Faerie, wasn’t all that unlikely.

“If we’re seen together, you’re less likely to be bothered,” said Cardan calmly. “Would it be that much of an ordeal?”

I listened for the trick in his words, the hint of mockery to tip me off to the humiliation he had in store for me.

He’d grown up, I realised with a pang of unease. He was no longer the vindictive, easily readable boy who’d tormented Taryn and me. By all accounts he was still petty, cruel and given to whimsy, but there was a certain sophistication to the way he carried himself.

“Very well.” I took his arm.

I’d always been better on the battlefield than the ballroom, yet Cardan guided me through the steps with effortless grace, to the point where a casual observer might have judged me a competent dancer. In the chill of the Milkwood, his hand was a welcome source of warmth pressed against mine.

“I would have expected you to be drinking the night away,” I confessed, not quite knowing why I was volunteering my thoughts. Silence was a weapon in such interactions as ours, where being the first to break might be considered a sign of weakness. “They always thought it would be you.”

He knew what I meant. Cardan and Nicasia had made a glittering pair, the clear regnants among their coterie of nobles.

A shrug, too smooth to be anything but premeditated. “Orlagh was aiming higher.”

And why should she not? With Balekin dead and Madoc locked in the Tower of Forgetting, Dain’s power on land was near absolute. An alliance with the Undersea was the last remaining step to rendering his reign unassailable, and Orlagh had been all too happy to acquiesce, on condition of placing her grandchild on the throne.

No one had ever asked Nicasia how she felt. For my part, I would take some measure of satisfaction in the thought that there might be truth to the rumours of her hatred for her husband-to-be. That would make one count on which fortune wasn’t ridiculously weighed towards her side.

“And you?” Cardan said. “How does life as Dain’s soldier suit you?”

My hackles were up in an instant. “I am loyal to the High King.”

“Ah, but loyal’s not the same thing as happy.”

I snorted. “What difference does it make to you?” As a knight, I was respected – as much as it was possible for a mortal to be respected in Faerie. I would never be one of them, but I was not entirely out of place, either. And I understood that that was the best I could aspire to. Dain had made it clear enough.

A scar still ran down my hand from the time he’d ordered me to stab myself. Small mercy that that was the only visible one.

“I hear musings from others who have also grown...disenchanted with my brother’s rule, and have taken notice of you.”

I was silent for several more bars, turning the nugget of insinuation over in my head. The atmosphere suddenly felt fraught, the sound of faerie flutes too sharp, Cardan’s fingers against my waist too hot.

I didn’t think he had the ingenuity to bait me with a false opportunity at treason. Then again, I didn’t think he had the ingenuity to be involved in a treasonous plot at all. Yet there we were.

I leaned in closer. “Out,” I hissed. “At the end of this song.”

We danced. Cardan’s gaze was fixed on me, a smile toying at the edges of his mouth. He wore a familiar expression of vague contempt, bored of everyone and everything and ready to throw out vicious jibes if it entertained him. He was beautiful. All harsh, perfect angles and seductive polish. A living reminder of everything forbidden to me by my birth, even as I knew no other home but Faerie. Suddenly I was feeling a lot less charitable.

When we were alone again, I drew a knife and set it against his throat. “Tell me.”

He didn’t even look surprised. It was unsettling. “A plot is in motion to unseat Dain for Elowyn by the end of the month.”

“And you need my help.”

Cardan smirked. “Not me, no. But Elowyn might have a boon to ask of you.”

“I can get that part. What I don’t understand is, why you? Surely whoever sent you, if they know of me at all, knows that you detest me.”

“Whoever _sent_ me?” His voice went stony, an eyebrow arched.

“You are not a schemer.”

“Of course not. I entertain, I make merry, I drink and feast and frolic. Scheming? That sounds like work. And work is for people like you, my dearest Jude, not for spoiled princelings like me. Isn’t that so?”

I sorted through the rush of emotions clouding my judgement despite my best efforts. I had hated Cardan, I had looked up to his station and down on his comportment. I had never felt tempted to speak to him as an equal – until now.

I slipped the knife back into its hidden sheath. “No one forced you. You sought me out of your own initiative.” Admitting it felt wrong, like I was conceding that there was a chance we might get each other after all. “Why?”

“I remembered how obstinate you were. Too stupidly ambitious for your own good. I thought you might want more options, besides the path my gracious brother has laid out for you.”

“I have what I want.”

I became aware of how close we stood. The lack of distance separating us, separating me from reason.

“You lie so easily. It fascinates me. But tell me the truth, just once: what do you really want?” he whispered, face inches from mine. I could have reached out and cut my fingers on his cheekbones.

A fit of recklessness came over me. I knew the answer to that question, for two years I’d known. Why should I not share it with Cardan Greenbriar, my sworn enemy, who’d offered me a gift he could not understand?

“I want to be free of Dain’s geas,” I said. “I want to wake up each day without the knowledge that I’m just a glorified slave.”

I had won when I outmaneuvered Madoc, thwarted his schemes and secured Dain’s crown. I had proven Cardan wrong when the High King himself acknowledged my place in Faerie. But so long as I lived at his pleasure, it would not be enough. Under my vow of obedience, I’d traded the yoke of many masters for one, and learned exactly how demanding the one could be. A winner’s curse.

I closed my eyes. The expected barbs never came. No mockery, which I would have deserved, even welcomed, as proof that someone saw my plight and understood it. Just the lightest brush of his lips against mine, so soft I could have imagined it.

“Mandrake Market, dusk two days from now. Wear this.” Cardan pressed a pair of pearl earrings into my hand. Then he smiled and slipped back into the revel, leaving me feeling as if I’d woken up from a two years’ sleep.

* * *

I went. Although I played at making a rational decision, my choice had been made from the start. I simply justified it afterward. “Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to,” Madoc had once told me, but speaking to Elowyn’s representative at a stall selling spider silk fabrics acquiring power itself felt suffocatingly difficult. The plot to topple Dain was shocking, so brazen I’d have thought Elowyn had no respect for her brother at all.

She had secured support from a wide range of Courts. Their rulers nursed old grudges, feared what Dain might become now that he no longer needed them, or had simply been offered a better deal. Now the only missing piece was for Dain to be dead and buried, his murder unconnected to Elowyn lest favour ebb from her towards one of her three remaining siblings.

That was where I came in.

Elowyn had an assassin prepared to take on the suicide mission, an imp who’d been foolish enough to yield his true name. He had no ties to her that could be uncovered. He had firm instructions to dispose of himself after doing the deed. He was loyal unto death – how could he not be?

All I’d have to do, as a dispensable mortal who was oftentimes tasked with standing guard at the High King’s door when Dain retreated alone into his study, was grant him entry.

It would be so very easy, I was almost offended that Elowyn didn’t mean to entrust me with more.

A pixie stepped on my foot as she rushed past. When I looked down, I was holding a note that hadn’t been there before.

I recognised the handwriting. Late nights playing chess with Madoc had allowed me numerous glimpses at his missives.

This one said: I know the Lark courts you. Come visit me.

* * *

_Come see me_ , the unwritten threat was, _or I will see your scheme undone_.

Insweal was a forbidding island, devoid of life save for a few stags, fir trees, and treefolk. Waves crashed against the black rocks encircling it, forming steep, jagged ledges filled with tide pools. On the northernmost tip perched the Tower of Forgetting.

A large, hairy soldier in beautifully wrought plate armour met me at the door. He sneered when he saw me, but let me in. Of course – he was more likely in Madoc’s pocket than not.

I forced down my unease at the lack of light in the antechamber, addressing the dim shapes in the room as if I saw them just as clearly as their faerie eyes saw me. “I’m Jude Duarte, knight in the High King’s court. I’m here to see Madoc.”

The first guard grunted and led me down stone stairs into darkness.

“Light the lamps,” I ordered.

Ahead of me, the guard stopped, and I registered his stillness by ear just in time to stop myself from walking into him. “And if I will not?”

“It’s alright, Vulciber.” The voice came from my right, and I whirled to face it. “Do as my daughter says.”

There were a few moments of shuffling as I tried to position myself to face the prisoner I now knew was watching me. A torch of green flame ignited, and he came into view before me. Madoc, former Grand General of Elfhame, my parents’ killer and my adopted father. The strategist I had defeated when I unearthed Balekin’s intended coup.

“Jude,” he said.

“Madoc,” I replied.

He looked me up and down in a way that felt like termites crawling over my skin. “It seems that barely a day has passed since you placed your best bet on the throne, and now already you seek to remove him. I wonder, daughter, how easily can your allegiances turn?”

I refused to take the bait. “What do you want, Madoc?”

“How much more do you think Elowyn will indulge you? Don’t tell me that you’ve learned nothing from the past two years.” He leaned forward, pressed up against the bars of his cell. “I underestimated you. I dismissed your ambition – your desire, in your heart, to rule over them. The difference between me and your new band of plotters is that I recognize my past mistake.”

“You didn’t set up this meeting to flatter me.”

“I summoned you in the hope that you might hear out an alternative, Jude. One that would greatly benefit the both of us.”

He smiled, baring pointed teeth.

“Eldred’s children are greedy, foolish, and set in their ways. Crown any of them, and you would delude yourself to imagine that you could win the influence you seek. You need another option. Someone younger, untainted by the intrigues of the High Court.”

“And where would I find such a candidate?”

Madoc’s cat eyes flashed in triumph. “Oak.”

* * *

Much later on, they would wonder how I did it. How I won myself a throne. They would marvel in fear, in astonishment, in what I decided to interpret as the barest scrapings of respect. But that was much later. For the time being I'd have to settle for Jude Duarte, mortal seneschal.

There was about zero chance I’d go along with Madoc’s plan, it being a thinly disguised pretext to put _him_ on the throne, but I listened intently as he regaled me with promises of glory and in the process gifted me secrets that could forge the destinies of kings.

I put them to good use.

First, I lied.

I told Cardan that I couldn’t join his plot. That some measure of suspicion was bound to fall on me, and when it did it would be far too easy for Elowyn to sell me out and cut me loose. It was true, and so he was inclined to believe me, even knowing that I was a liar and had little love for Dain anymore.

“I need an assurance from you,” I bartered. Any ‘please’s, any wavering, and he’d have been suspicious. “I need to know that at least one of Rhyia’s cadre will not gainsay me. Swear yourself into my service.”

“A year and a day,” he conceded through gritted teeth, and it took all my strength to hide how monumental a victory that much was to me.

Second, I lied.

I knocked out Elowyn’s assassin as he stood over the body of Dain and dragged him into the woods. I spoke the true name I’d stalked the Court of Larks for sleepless weeks to hear once, and set him my own commands. Back at the Court of Shadows, I lamented my failure to resist the enchantment the assassin had forced on me until it was too late.

Third, I remained silent.

When Elowyn’s assassin caught her unawares and slit her throat as she was preparing to stake her triumphant claim to the Blood Crown, and then babbled on of his hatred for the Greenbriars and his quest to see them all dead, I remained silent. When Cardan put the pieces together and glared at me in naked revulsion, forbidden to gainsay me by my direct orders, I remained silent.

When Rhyia and Caelia sparred for Cardan’s support as he twirled the crown between his pale hands, I remained silent and waited for Oak to emerge with Vivi and take the crown from Cardan, as I’d arranged.

Oak darted a glance at me. I nodded in permission.

“Cardan Greenbriar,” Oak said, and in that name I heard my own. “I crown you High King of Faerie.”

* * *

I spared Rhyia and Caelia. The former at Vivi’s behest, the latter at Cardan’s. Both packed away to Hollow Hall, kept under lock and key. I wouldn’t have lost a moment’s sleep at executing either. Vivi’s political capital was nonexistent while Cardan had a snowball’s chance in hell of reciprocating my gesture. And yet. I can’t say what it was that stayed my hand. Perhaps the thought, always lurking around the edges of my consciousness: was this how it felt to control the throne, then?

To always be looking over your shoulder, watching out for the vultures circling with sharpened claws and insatiable hunger?

To trust no one, least of all the people you’d once have called your closest friends?

I’d never been much given to the fairytales, nor the sentimentality that accompanied them. That was Taryn’s domain. Yet as I strolled through the corridors of the Palace of Elfhame, I couldn’t help but relish in the haze of satisfaction that comes with knowing I had won.

I eschewed the retinue of guards that I’d have been entitled to, as the new High King’s seneschal, in favour of just one. I sensed hatred radiating from The Ghost every time I caught his hazel eyes staring at me with that unnatural stillness, but he could make no move against me. I had woven my commands too well.

_Larkin Gorm Garrett, your loyalty lies with me now._

Taryn had been all too willing to sell out that little tidbit in exchange for a life of comfort in the mortal world, when the alternative was the Tower of Forgetting. I exiled her out of the love I once had for her. Locke I had assassinated swiftly, one command to the Ghost and it was done. It wouldn’t do to grant him the luxury of a public execution and give him a chance to spin one last story under the eye of the masses.

He wouldn’t be the last. With the Greenbriar coffers behind me, it was trivial to arrange an accident for Madoc. He was long forgotten by then, Elfhame enraptured by the viciousness of their new Grand General Grima Mog. When I heard rumours that Grimsen was trying to forge a new crown in lieu of wresting the current one from my hands, I took care of him too.

I celebrated my successful poisoning of Grimsen with a cup of mortal wine, taken alone in my room. Twirling the goblet, my gaze fell on my left hand. How convenient a reminder it made, of the people who’d walked over me once and thought they’d gotten away with it. The scar on the centre of my palm, courtesy of Dain.

The older wound, the missing tip of my ring finger, bitten off by one of Madoc’s guards when I was nine. When I screamed, he smacked my head into a wooden post in the stables to shut me up, then held me in place while he chewed the piece. Finally he hurled the requisite expletives at my mortal birth and warned me to keep silent, on pain of eating the rest of me.

My mortal parents used to banter about idioms in a kitchen that smelled of gingerbread cookies and laughter. “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Mom once said. I must have inherited my wisdom from her.

I didn’t eat the guard’s fingers, such vulgarity obviously being beneath me. I put the bloody pieces in a pouch, all ten of them, stowed them away in a desk drawer as a reminder of what I could do.

But let’s not pretend I was merciless: I let him die a few days later.

Nicasia was less fortunate. She would never be allowed to die, as the High King’s collateral against a revolt of the Undersea. She hadn’t spared me Elfhame’s harshest humiliations when I was the least among them, and in turn I gave her no clemency. Subjecting her to the mockery of the court that had once adored her was as much strategy as it was satiation: _we have your daughter, Orlagh, but she remains whole and hale. Have a care where you next step, lest Nicasia’s circumstances change._

In the early days, Cardan made his best effort at subverting my rule, as expected. “My Queen,” he mocked me, a louche smile plastered across his face as he lazed on his throne. “What a pity not one of your loyal subjects knows who truly rules them.”

Cardan had been drinking himself into oblivion since his ascension. I couldn’t entirely blame him. It must gall to be made into my puppet. All the same, my plans were less effective with a figurehead veering on invalid levels of debauchery, and I needed him to get his act together for the sake of appearances.

“Much can happen in a year and a day,” he offered, waving a bejeweled hand. “And there will always be times when you forget to command me, or when you are unable to. How do you intend to plan for every eventuality, my dear seneschal?”

“Caelia,” I said. “Do not forget whose mercy she lives at, safe and well cared for.”

He looked at me then, truly looked at me, and I felt something splinter inside me at the thought that even Cardan, who’d come to me that night not so long ago singing a tune of acknowledgement, hadn’t seen me until then. It was followed by a dose of fear that things would change.

What could change, though? I had won. I held all the cards that mattered. It made no difference whether my puppet viewed me as a tyrant or a (very) reluctant ally.

I made myself walk away. Afterwards, Cardan arrived at Living Council meetings in a presentable state. He maintained a presence of authority at revels, and he spoke to me with perfect cordiality when we held court, in the manner of a king consulting his trusted advisor. In private he was deferential, agreeable, signing the decrees I placed in front of him and accepting my commands with a bare nod.

I had never had it so easy in Elfhame. And by the end I had never felt so empty, so resigned to my victory. Cardan, my sisters, acquaintances from school: no one spoke a syllable more to me than they needed to. If they did, it was inevitably in pursuit of something from me, as if the High King’s power could rub off on them. Sycophants and flunkies aside, I was utterly alone.

I had everything I’d dreamed of. Is this how it feels to win?

* * *

By the end of my year and a day, I have everything set up the way I wanted. Oak will be High King, and I will rule through him. Like so many others, I’ve bound him with his true name, pried from Oriana as the price I’d asked for suffering her son to live.

Pity for the Folk that they exercise the powers of glamour and immortality, weapons far beyond mortal reach, yet they can be felled by a few whispered syllables. Maybe my conception of the balance between us has been the wrong way round all along.

Oak will be more malleable than Cardan. Oh, Cardan plays a good game of deference, but lately I’ve caught on to his poisonous stares that linger a moment too long. He’s always played the fool to disguise his cleverness. His recent cooperation is a natural extension.

I shudder to think of what he has planned for the day he’s free of my grasp. He’ll have many allies still, faeries who despise me for rising beyond my station and pine for the cruel prince they remember, before he became my creature.

But soon it’ll be over. Oak will wear the Blood Crown. Cardan will be consigned to Hollow Hall with his sisters, far from the court’s hungry eyes.

The opposite of love isn’t hatred: it’s indifference. That is my sentence for him.

I call a revel on the night of Oak’s coronation, gathering the kings and queens of low courts across Faerie. Ostensibly it’s to renew their vows of loyalty to their High King. Which is not quite a lie: they will indeed swear fresh vows, only it will be to Oak Greenbriar, once I compel Cardan to crown him.

I dance with Cardan. Standing this close I read the tightness in his jaw, sense the steady flame of his hatred as he sweeps me through the brugh. His hand clasps mine in a vise-like grip.

“You’ve picked a fine day for your coronation,” he murmurs.

My eyes widen before I can stop them. I’ve shared exactly none of this plot with him. It was not one where he had a role to play; that is, no role beyond sacrifice.

“You can’t really believe that I don’t know what you’re up to.”

He twirls me under his arm. He’s wearing an exquisite emerald doublet trimmed with gold lace, the Greenbriar colours. It shouldn’t look good against his skin tone, but it does. I guess that’s one of the numerous benefits of being magical and the King of Faerie to boot. Everything looks good on you.

I’m aware that in my juniper gown, with my hair woven to resemble a crown, we make a beautiful pair on the surface. I have sent my message effectively: that I can play on the High King’s level, even oppose him if it pleases me.

I spot Oak out of the corner of my eye, munching away happily on faerie fruit. Oriana has prepared him well. Young as he is, he’ll fit in just fine at court.

If I can make Cardan follow through, now that he knows the command I plan to give him. If he hasn’t schemed his own schemes to thwart mine.

He notices my nascent fear.

“My Queen,” Cardan says, mocking. “Why not me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve seen you at work. I can give you what you want most.”

“And that would be?”

“Power, of course. If you had my wholehearted support, imagine what you could do.”

My spine stiffens, and I jerk Cardan back with too much force on the next beat. “Do not forget you are still sworn to me, for five days more. Don’t joke at my expense.”

“I’m serious.” He does look it – more serious than I’ve ever seen him. But I know better than to trust him. “You are brilliant, Jude, the most ruthless and effective strategist Elfhame has seen in an age. But you can’t account for every possibility. And as seneschal, you will never be known for your true worth. You’ll forever be in the shadows, held with suspicion and contempt for your birth.”

I laugh mirthlessly. Cardan would know. Even if he hadn’t spent enough time making sure I knew my place when we were in school, he is the symbol of everything I can’t have. Faerie prince, born to live young and beautiful and revered forever, without a care for anyone not directly in his orbit. “And what would you do about that?”

He looks away, as though he’s following my thoughts and feels a semblance of embarrassment. “You made me the High King, Jude. Let me _be_ the High King.”

“Now I know you’re joking.”

“I’m going about this all wrong. Marry me,” he blurts out. “Become the Queen of Elfhame.”

Cold shock hits me. “But you _can’t_.” Then again, of course he can. In my year as a puppeteer I have learned just how much you can do with the power of the High King. Doors open for you; locks mysteriously disappear. What I really mean is, he _won’t_. Not unless it is to murder me on our wedding night.

“I’ve acquired a taste for power,” Cardan says, managing to sound bored even though his flicking tail betrays his apprehension. “I have no great aversion to cruelty, as you well know, and I notice more than you give me credit for. I’ve picked up a few tricks from your friends at the Court of Shadows. If you gave me the chance, I’d be surprisingly good for you.”

We’re standing too close. I’m reminded of the first time we danced, an evening so similar yet so different to this one. A lifetime ago. I’m hit with the irrational urge to reach out and dig my nails into his perfect face as proof that whatever else happens, I once left my mark on the High King of Faerie.

I can’t marry Cardan. I definitely can’t marry Oak. Compared to that...

Part of me still doesn’t want to do this to my adoptive brother, no matter the gulf between us. Part of me doesn’t want to rob him of the last vestiges of freedom and use him into perpetuity. To what end? The vultures circle on land and the sharks from the Undersea, and as Oak’s seneschal I will eventually be toppled just as I toppled Dain.

But if I marry Cardan...

“I cannot control you,” I say.

“You won’t have to.” He looks straight at me. “And I need you.”

That much, at least, is true. Cardan is many things, but he’s not a murderer, and a murderer is what he’ll need to keep the throne.

“And if I say yes? Then the marriage will take place in the month of never when the moon rises in the west and the tides flow backward.”

“No. Right here, right now. We exchange vows, and it’s done.”

Without ever taking his eyes off mine, he lifts my hand gently, and kisses the scar of my palm.

It says so much, that simple touch of his lips.

I know he wants me.

I have known since I was seventeen and found a piece of parchment in his bedroom, furiously scrawled with my name again and again. In the middle of the High King’s court, dizzy from the music and the cloying aroma of faerie fruit, I am so incredibly tempted to want him back.

“Vows of the Folk do not need witnesses,” Cardan continues quietly, “But you’ll have them all the same.” He gestures at the crowd partying around us, the more daring or infatuated amongst them throwing unsubtle glances of desire at him, or else disgust at me.

The latter seals my decision. “I don’t want them staring at me like a toy. We exchange vows tonight. I’ll come to you, after this is done. Now I told the Folk to expect an announcement. I suggest you deliver, before I change my mind.”

I stand by Cardan’s side as he calls for quiet with little more than a raised hand and an imperious look.

“Jude tells me that she promised you a show,” he says. “I would not disappoint you. From this day on, she is no longer my seneschal.”

I take in the smirks of familiar and not-so-familiar faces who have been waiting for this moment. Randalin looks faintly relieved. Nihuar curls her lip in derision.

How they would like to see me brought low, the mortal girl who has no place in Faerie.

Cardan continues. “Jude will be my wife. The High Queen of Elfhame. And you will swear fealty to her as you would to me.”

The uproar is deafening. I have eyes only for Cardan. He links his arm through mine without hesitation. Something has shifted permanently between us, a new understanding from the least anticipated source.

“Madness,” a courtier shouts. I let that slide with an imperious smirk. Any subject of Elfhame who does not yet see how delicate the line lies between madness and greatness will soon.

“Whore,” another voice mutters, and this is an insult too far.

Cardan stills beside me, having heard the same. A sneer crosses his porcelain features. It’s an expression I have seen hundreds of times. Tonight, for the first time, it kindles my delight.

I search out the offending faerie. A pixie. His eyes dart from side to side, beginning to wonder if he’s overstepped himself. The crowd hushes, predictable as always. I’ve whetted their appetite. I intend to feed it.

“Hold him still,” I order his companions. They hesitate, they look to Cardan first – I’ll have to train that out of them – but they obey.

“No, no,” the pixie starts, as he sees what I’m about to do. “Please...Your Highness, stop her, she can’t...”

I tear his wings off. His screams drown out all the dread, all the terror that have plagued me since Madoc murdered my mortal parents and made me one of his.

I have won beyond my wildest dreams, and I will be the most terrible ruler Elfhame has seen.


End file.
